Convergence
by coincident
Summary: This is how the heart remembers. Forty years in firsts and lasts. Madara/Hashirama, one-shot.


**A/N**: For **PikaCheek****a. **I was asked for a fic about first meetings, and in my quest to mix it up a little, it got slightly out of hand. The timeline is a bit experimental, so I hope it worked out...

Enjoy!

* * *

**ten years**

* * *

This is the first time Madara hears the name:

Izuna is clinging to his leg and crying and he needs to get to the supply tent before the sentries notice, because he's small and he's capable and he's been sent to tip a vial into the Yamanaka coalition's rations since he can do it better than anyone else, or so the elders say. He wishes Izuna would stop crying.

"_Stop _it," he tells his brother. "I'm doing a mission. Go away."

"I don't care," sobs Izuna. "Don't go anywhere without me."

"_Izuna_—"

"Please, onii-san! I'll help you, I promise. _Please_—"

"Stop crying and hold this, then," snaps Madara, and hands the small lantern to his brother. Izuna hiccups softly and rubs at one eye with the heel of his palm. Madara turns away because he hates looking at his brother sometimes; Izuna's grey cheeks, and the dull flicker of his fledgling sharingan. Most of the time Izuna looks like a silent wraith, which is bearable, but it's worse when he actually cries.

"This is as far as we can go with that light before the sentries see us," he says gruffly. "Put the lantern out."

Izuna's eyes widen. "Onii-san!"

"Do it, _stupid_," says Madara meanly, and it has the desired effect; Izuna's lip stops trembling and pushes forward into a sulky pout. Madara doesn't mind. It's fine; anything is better than tears. His brother holds the lantern up and blows it out.

The mission itself is far too easy and doesn't seem to have much to do with the _glory of shinobi life_, which is something Madara's been hearing and balancing like a chain in his hand since he was young enough to understand language. The phrase clanks forward in heavy metal consonants and snaps like unfurled flags, and Madara expected it to sound something like those things when he actually found it, but instead it sounds like this: hollow wind boring through the stone night of the Fire Country, Izuna's sharp intake of breath at the sight of all the food, the clatter of wooden mugs as Yamanaka sentries laugh outside.

"Just hold _still_," hisses Madara to his brother, and removes the vial from the inside of his tunic. _Mustn't smell it, mustn't touch it, Madara-kun_, they told him. _Just pour it in the water barrel, just like that. Easy. Be a brave little shinobi._

Izuna quiets. He knows how to be a brave little shinobi too.

Madara edges forward and slips the cork from the vial. He tips it, and like a great glittering smear of ash the liquid flashes slick on the water and disperses. Under the surface, Madara can see deep green clouds unwinding. He hadn't expected it to be beautiful.

"Onii-san," says Izuna, and his voice sounds choked. Madara glances over at him. Izuna is holding an apple and crying again, crying in silent strangled sobs that aren't his fault, because the apple is whole and round and clean and neither of them have seen anything like it in months. Madara swallows. The last time they'd foraged at an abandoned campsite, Izuna had found an apple half-rotted, held together by layers of brown tissue seething with flies, and Madara had dragged him bodily away from it before his brother could kneel and shove the fruit into his mouth anyway. Izuna knows better now. Madara ignores the way his entire mouth goes wet at the red, red skin, and nods so that Izuna can take the first bite.

He is there when he hears the name—breaking his concentration with his fast—while beside him poison settles into fresh water and the men outside plot the destruction of his own clan. He is there, and these things clamor for attention, tugging at his hands, carding fingers through his hair, scraping away at his tight spare skin with the dull strokes of war. He holds very still and helps his mind let go of each distinct fear, and it is then that he hears the sentries outside mention the name: _nine years old and already created his own technique—makes trees and flowers, have you ever heard of such a thing?—_things are written like that, set down in brisk unthinking brush strokes on a scroll as white and dry as Madara's cheeks in the dull light from outside.

He is a child. His brother shyly hands him a jagged piece of apple, and the name comes in from outside and touches his ears as his tongue forgets the taste of starvation. Years later, every time his teeth break crisp red skin, he will think _Senju Hashirama, _and he will remember this.

* * *

**fifty years**

* * *

This is the last time Hashirama hears the name:

It comes as a whisper through the rice-paper door, because he is old enough that they have allowed him the dignity of dying within a house and not a medical tent. He rests one hand atop his coverlet. Mito places her own fingers close enough to touch, yet leaving a careful gradation of deferential space between them, and asks if he is well.

"Yes," he says.

Her eyes are blue, but in their startling clarity they have always reminded him of the near-transparency of green tea. He sometimes feels that he can stare through Mito's eyes into the well of her spirit, a vein of blue fire, and scoop handfuls of slow-burning brightness from it like sustenance. He thinks that, in a manner of speaking, this is not far from what he has been doing for the past twenty-five years. She hears the name too.

"I will tell them to speak more quietly," she says, rising and drawing her shawl closer around her like a coccoon. Wartime has required most of the women to give up their luxuries, but Mito has given up nothing; she has always lived as simply as he has. The room has a bed and two tables and a lifetime's worth of brittle sunlight, as mottled with silver shadows as the pattern on marzipan, and a flat reed mat that, even at the end, she keeps as clean as she did the day of their marriage.

"Let them speak," he says.

"This village owes you your peace," she replies, and goes to the door. Someone is quieted, someone apologizes, she returns.

"What were they talking about?"

"Nothing of importance," So he knows it's him. Even if she won't say the name, he knows.

She swabs his forehead with a wet cloth, although there is no sweat there and he feels clean, emptied and blank as a pouch of coins spilled over the ground.

"I want to hear them."

She wrings the cloth the way she wrings necks, crisp and efficient. The image is nonsensical. He has never seen her wring anyone's neck. She does not, of course, use contact fighting in her ninjutsu. A stream of water falls back into the bowl in a progression of bright droplets. Outside, the sun climbs; tepid rays end themselves in the water. Hashirama is thirsty. He thinks: I am dying, and I am thirsty. Was it like this for you—did you—

"Tell me to stop," he says, and his voice comes out much quieter than he intended. He sees by the way she stills that she knows exactly what he means. She has always noticed the peculiar silence that comes with those treacherous thoughts before he realizes it himself, and she is efficient at whisking it away like skin forming over milk. _Stop thinking of him_, she says usually. _Remember your duties_. _Stop_.

She doesn't ask him to stop this time.

Hashirama bites his tongue and brings his hand close to his face. A blue wash of sky behind his hand framed in the window, the same blue sky that had been visible through the awning of a tent, the same slowness, like a liquid red eye opening behind long-lashed lids.

"Water—"

He thinks of Madara, and of the sword angled upwards through his right lung and punching out between the ninth or tenth vertebrate of his spine, of the blood in rivulets around his mouth. A pink tongue, the single clean color amidst the dirt and the wreckage, scrabbling wildly at his lips as if to leech the moisture from his skin. He has known for years that Madara is alive. He has even seen him a handful of times throughout those years, but the memory of the fight is the single scar that has not grown tough with tissue. His own hands have not allowed him to forget that he delivered a killing blow, and Madara, even in whatever madness had overtaken him in those days, had not.

_I am sorry,_ he thinks. There is water in his eyes, as if his body still responds to Madara's need. His hands are shaking. In the end, the Kyuubi's roar is silent, the screams of children are silent, the clamor of the village is silent—there is only Madara's voice, cracked and so young in its bitterness, saying—

"—_water_—"

"It's here," says Mito quickly, and although he is swallowing and swallowing, his throat is still dry. He puts his hand to the bandage below his ribcage and feels the sticky wetness he knows so well by now, although whatever Mito has distilled into his water has dampened the pain. He understands: _this is the way an ending feels._

He sets the glass down. His wife, ever wise, does nothing to stop him. Her clear eyes are oddly sad. He wonders if she loved him.

"Your brother will take good care of your village," she says.

He nods. He is sorry for her, as well, because she was never enough, and she knew that from the instant they met.

But for now, as the Shodaime waits to die, he pulls the bedsheets away so that he can see the wound leaking through the bandages. He sets his hands on top of one another. For years he has forced his mind to skirt the edges of memories, turning his senses away from dark hair and skin that felt like paper and the memory of his own voice, shaky, reduced to adolescence as nothing has reduced him since then. There have only been a handful of encounters over the decades, but a handful is enough; a rosary is made of only selected beads, polished to fineness by desperate hands endlessly seeking fulfillment in the grain. Hashirama pulls them forth and cups each one individually. He makes prayers of the empty days. Foolish wishes bubble from his lips. He wishes the men outside would say Madara's name again, but nothing comes, so he says it himself, over and over like a man taking great gulps of air. In the edges of his vision, he can see his wife's cheeks wet with tears.

_I hope you found what you wanted._

_I hope that you thought of me._

_I hope that—_

* * *

**twelve years**

* * *

This is the first time Madara sees him:

The high range of mountains at the border is the highest point in the Lightning Country, and the chill permeates linen and armor alike. Cold makes the men of the Uchiha sullen, despite their affinity with the element of fire. The caravan stretches away through silent trees. Red-eyed sentries patrol ahead, but the rest have closed faces, grey cheeks, lips taut and discontent against the knifelike wind.

"What children," says Madara coldly, and ignores the way his own unbroken voice still wavers over the words. "We won't make the Fire Country by nightfall at this rate."

"Patience, Madara-kun," someone calls. Madara turns his face away and pulls the collar of his cloak higher around his neck. It does little; cold is a skeletal thing that lives in the bones. Like hunger. He wonders when his body will be his to call his own again.

"I'm sure we'll get there, onii-san," pipes up Izuna. He is nine, and knows enough to move quickly so that the cold doesn't settle in his limbs. Madara feels a comforting weight of pride, watching his brother flicker between the trees.

The land is bare and has a feral loveliness about it, the way a bare sky still invites the upward glance. Far enough away, the dip of the valley is visible through the branches.

"Should we send up a signal flare?" asks one of the men worriedly. "Let the rest know of our location, if we don't make it?"

Madara loses his patience. "We _would _make it, if the rest of you ceased dragging your feet," he snaps. "Look at Izuna, nine years old and using _shunshin_. You call yourselves warriors?"

"_Madara-kun_," says one of the other shinobi, an older, burlier man, and Madara falls silent. "It's a valid question. A warrior's mindset involves preparation for the eventuality of failure."

"Eventuality?" asks Madara. "You're _planning _to fail?"

"Onii-san…" says Izuna worriedly. "Stop it. Come on, you can come ahead with me—"

Madara brushes his brother's hand from his elbow. "You can't light a signal flare anyway. There was a battle here quite recently. Look at the sky." And indeed, a thin trail of smoke traces its way upwards as they watch.

"Should we send a scout—"

"Second time right," he sneers. "I'll go."

He can hear Izuna apologizing as he leaves, but it only makes him piston his legs faster, escaping the caravan and the trail of quiet faces. Frozen branches snap with gunpowder sounds in the air. Winter makes everything a little brittle, a little echoing, so that the sounds are a hundred times louder and tinged with the strange blue note of loneliness. He reaches a ridge over the valley and directs chakra to his feet so that he can take his first steps forward on the ice.

The movement takes him out over the lip of the crevasse, and then he stops dead.

The entire valley is a green so deep he feels that he must be hallucinating; his first reaction is to place his fingers together and say "_Kai_!" several times, although when he activates the sharingan he knows that no genjutsu can pass his eyes. But he has never been directly involved in single combat, although he's held his own in melee fights, so he wonders if it's some kind of technique he knows nothing about. Then he realizes that it is, in fact, actually a technique he already knows.

_-makes trees and flowers, have you ever heard of such a thing?_

He spins the sharingan as he searches for pockets of chakra, and then he sees them—or a single mass of chakra, an upright boy among the foliage. These trees are flush with greenery and the sweet scent of ripe bark, and as Madara's gaze falls upon the face of the shinobi who made them, he thinks that it's no wonder, if they came from someone like this. _Senju Hashirama _lets his dark hair fall in rivulets like silk over his armor. His hands are outstretched, tense along the fingertips and the wide-stretched thumbs. From his palms, leaves still fall like last notes of music.

Madara is captivated before he realizes that this is what it is.

_What children_, he thinks again. _What would they do, in the face of this power_?

There is no meeting of eyes or glances, just acceptance sliding between his ribs like a knife-edge, and the invisible reassurance of the fact that someone like this _exists_, settling around his thin shoulders and the inverted plane of his chest like an extra cloak. The whiteness of the mountain glitters around him. Terrible beauty, and this is what Hashirama would see if he were to glance up, but he doesn't. He remains like this, hands spread wide as he throws his magic net over fields that unfurl only for him.

In the end, the mountains hold only a five-foot stretch of scuffed ice to show that the greatest Uchiha ever to live laid eyes on the man whose destiny would form his, as a sword sharpens itself against a river-stone, and then left in the same silence that he came. The green trees all die the following year, adding their black bones to the forests of the high places.

Madara's silence trails behind him all the rest of the way to the Fire Country.

* * *

**forty-seven years  


* * *

**

This is the last time Hashirama sees him:

The Nidaime Mizukage declares war on Konoha without so much as a warning to close the borders. The raid comes as a surprise to everyone in the Fire Country, especially when the bodies of emissaries are sent back in pieces. The assembly cries at the sight. Hashirama himself feels so ill he leaves the Tower and walks all the way into the street, where he ignores citizenry and shinobi and everyone else and simply sits at the stone wall at the border of the village, holding his head in his hands.

"You gave them the fucking Yonbi, nii-san," says Tobirama later. "Peacekeeping tool my _ass_, what'd you think they'd do?"

"Go to Kirigakure and speak with the Nidaime under diplomatic sanction,"Mito counsels him. "We have taken care to keep on very good terms with him after the Shodaime was killed, and this is unprecedented."

"And if nothing should come of it?"

"If nothing should come of it, you have little to worry about," she replies curtly. "We will see how well this hidden village of yours functions. The jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi, at least, is always at your service."

She is, and their daughters are, and his brother is, and his entire damn _village _is at his service and still Hashirama is uneasy when he steps off the ship. For his wife is correct, and it _is _unprecedented, but the swipe of guilt in the pit of his stomach makes it impossible for him to believe that he has done everything in his power to stop the Second World War. He knows, after all, the wisps of chakra that lie scattered over Kiri's docks and caught in its mist like dropped strands of dark hair. On the pier itself, he sinks his hand into the faint traces of that chakra. It still catches in his nails. It still sets his heart aching.

The Nidaime Mizukage is not himself. Hashirama knows the genjutsu as well. When he hears _cover for succession _and _Sandaime-sama _among the whispers of Kiri's courtesans, he knows his suspicions were correct. He pens a letter to Mito, and then he stays in the Mizukage Tower for two extra days as a guest of the negotiations.

He is rewarded on late evening of the second day.

Without the mask he has taken to wearing, his old enemy looks much the same. Alarmingly so—for Hashirama's hair is streaked with grey, and he knows his jaw has grown thick with unwieldy bone, but Madara is as beautiful as the day he left. More still. His features have a fine aristocracy about them that the statue—_that statue_, that Hashirama visits every week and still knows as well as the sight of his own face in the mirror—can never hope to replicate. Madara's glance over his face is as cool as the moon. He stops, letting the swiveling beacon from Kiri's lighthouse carve a swathe of pale silver over one cheek, and when he looks at Hashirama there is no recognition in his face.

A thousand evaded glances and buried memories crash down around Hashirama's ears like a house splinted on cheap timbers, and all the carefully-constructed arguments he saved like children's notes are lost in the din of fire crackling in wood. Strangely, he feels as if he has been soaked for the first time in years—or perhaps it is the opposite; perhaps he has found himself on dry land, and the roaring, tumbling, _living _sensation of waves against his body has finally ended. Perhaps his sadness, like a message in a bottle, has been lost on its way to someone who no longer exists. His memory of Madara has always been as a creature of feeling, alight with wonder: wonder from under cover of the mountainside, feet balanced precariously over ice as he watches Hashirama cover a forgotten valley with trees. He wonders if Madara ever knew that he saw him there, and that the feral vulnerability in his face at that moment was something of their time together that he has never been able to find again in all the moments and all the people and all the sights of the world he created.

Memory, as he knows now, has its own duties. Madara's name in his populace's mouths is always linked with words like _criminal _and _monster _and _traitor _now, but his memory is the greatest traitor of them all, for he can never think of him without thinking of a half-wild boy, mad with duty and his own brilliance but still _a boy_, and only this, no matter what the decades have made of him. Sometimes Hashirama is still stunned by the realization that he is the only one in the wide world who can remember Madara in this way.

The pale spectre walks forward—_Sandaime Mizukage, _how far they have come—and then he is level with him, and then he is past him. Distances grow with each footstep. There is one, and then there is another, and then Madara is gone.

Hashirama has never lost a fight—but again and again, like this, Madara teaches him what it means to be powerless.

* * *

**fourteen years  


* * *

**

This is the first time Madara fights him:

He is fast but Hashirama is faster, parrying fire and sword and scythe with hundreds of thorn bushes that snake out of nowhere and catch on the edges of his clothing. Madara wets his lips and tries again.

They have nothing to say to one another because the battle is for the daimyo's castle at the Nakano delta, and the hallways are full to bursting with shinobi like overflowing blood in tired veins. The Senju are defending, and the Uchiha are laying siege. Madara is furious that they appear to be losing despite the opposition's inefficiency. The Senju make no use of the towers or the parapets, despite the fact that a single trough of boiling lead upended over the Uchiha battalion would decimate them beyond their capacity to advance. Still, he is wary of the possibility. Several feet away, he spots the flicker of Izuna's shunshin, always the loveliest technique in the room.

But tonight, there is competition, because Hashirama's movements are like nothing Madara has ever seen. He takes several avoidable blows for the sheer inability to stop _staring_, staring at the fact that Hashirama either makes seals too fast for his sharingan eyes to follow or doesn't make them at all, or at dark hair that always falls straight, pulled towards the ground even as its owner flies. Hashirama does not move his hands at all, but still the wood shoots in every direction, wherever he looks, with the movements of his eyes as his hands stay clasped together in front of him. Madara can't stop watching, and in some part of his mind beyond conscious thought he doesn't _want _to.

He has never told anyone—there is no one to tell—but he knows very well that the dearest longing of greatness is for a mirror to reflect it. Somewhere between starvation and frustration and the endless machinations of a clan that grows dull around him, he has formulated the idea that a worthy opponent is not someone to measure his strength against, but someone in front of whom he can lay down these burdens one after another. In front of a worthy opponent, he thinks, he will not need to temper his speed or censor his words—he is unfettered; in front of a worthy opponent, he is set free. He raises the scythe to show Hashirama this—for this is how he can speak without speaking—and then suddenly he notices Izuna falter and go down as if clubbed over the head. Madara lets out a shout, but his brother doesn't turn. He casts his eyes wildly around—_genjutsu_, there, from a dark-haired woman on the western wall—and this is all the time Hashirama needs for a wooden beam to shoot forward and pin him against the stones. The planks make a pitchfork around his neck and draw forth a thin line of blood.

Madara waits for the killing blow, but instead, his enemy's eyes follow his own, across the narrow hallway, up a small flight of stairs, and to where Izuna lies, forgotten for the moment in the midst of battle. Hashirama's lips part.

Then, with a courteous movement that makes Madara angry enough to stay, for a moment, he dislodges the wooden beam and lets him go. As Madara gasps for air, Hashirama hauls him up by his shirt collar. He shakes him once, briskly, and then pushes him toward his little brother. Madara turns back, enraged, but Hashirama has already moved forward.

He reaches Izuna with the feeling of losing his bearings foremost in his mind. Back in his tent that night, he traces his fingers along the laceration left by the beam of wood at his neck. Small ridges, already healing. Bumps like ripples under the surface. Like metal balls in a chain. Like beads in a rosary, calling forth prayers that have never before existed from beneath his skin.

* * *

**thirty-seven years**

* * *

This is the last time Hashirama fights him:

It's the third mission he's taken in the last year that lets him bypass the Water Country, and although Mito disapproves, she's still packed him warm clothes and water-resistant material to pitch tents. This time his oldest daughter has accompanied him. He continues to protest all the way out of the Fire Country, but the girl is as serenely obstinate as her mother when set upon something, and pays him no attention at all. Now she flickers ahead through trees flush with autumn leaves, calling things like _I can see Kiri from here, do you want to make camp or go on? _and _Can I catch us dinner?_ Her own red hair is all the camoflauge she needs.

At their campsite, she burns a stack of crabapples and fallen leaves to cover the stench of gutted meat. The smoke rises in lazy spirals, higher and higher, turning to gossamer floss as it reaches the sky. Hashirama sluices their hands with water and helps her bandage a blistered foot and refills her canteen and then he sees him through the trees, and the stream of poured water jerks awry and stains a section of his leather traveling boot as dark as blood.

Eyes meet, and then Madara bolts.

Hashirama springs up, upending the canteen and the stilted sticks for the cookpot, and holds out his hand. "Give me your bow," he cries. "And your quiver!"

"Tou-san, what—"

"_Give them to me!" _

He knows from the moment he begins the chase that it is completely futile. Still, along the quiet landscape, it is only them—the hunter and the hunted again, as they have not been since they were both very young—and this is the last measure of togetherness left to them. It isn't much of a confrontation. Madara's feet do not touch the ground at all, and Hashirama is out of practice after so many years of desk work. Still, he lets the trees help him, stretching out his hands to bend the timbers like he bends his own muscles. The edges of the boughs are filigreed with gold. Madara's hair among the bright shades is a hidden sheaf of smoke itself, always warning of fire, a fire that still burns under Hashirama's heart even as he nocks the arrow and lets the bowstring twang. The shaft thuds straight through his old enemy and into the tree trunk on the other side.

He wants to ask, as he did in the old days—_where did you learn that_? _Is that a new technique_? But instead he simply palms another arrow. Old grain, reformed and used in war. Weapons made before there were buildings or paths in the old country, and before he and Madara had found one another in careful circling movements like those of wolves or falcons. Even now, he sees the drops of blood beading on the edge of his wooden beam, and the bright wound like a scarlet rose at Madara's throat as he knelt to hoist his brother's arm over his shoulder.

_Look at me like that again_, he nearly shouts. _What did you want to say to me?_

But he knows, even as Madara comes closer, that Madara is not the one who wants to say anything at all. The other man comes close to him, picks up the bow, and sets it in Hashirama's palm. Hashirama reaches out for the edge of Madara's tunic, but his hand brushes straight through it. Touching him has always been like touching smoke over silk, but now there is only smoke, no skin or curvature of bone beneath it. Madara steps forward, close enough to feel his breath, and then he walks straight through Hashirama and leaves as he always does.

Hashirama stands there with the useless bow. He listens to the leaves crack behind him, infinitesimal bones breaking under Madara's footsteps.

"Tou-san?"

His daughter's eyes are wide. He doesn't know what she has seen. As she puts her arms around him—awkwardly, small limbs still unaccustomed to the shapes of comfort—he closes his eyes and feels her long hair smooth against his cheek, and he ties himself to earth with it, feeling the wood and the sunlight and the dirt of his village in each individual strand. _You are my life now_, he thinks. _You are my love_ _now_, and it is only with this that the tears come.

* * *

**fifteen years**

* * *

This is the first time Madara speaks with him:

"_Stop_!"

He stops, the fan still hoisted over his shoulder. In front of him, his katon rinses foot soldiers from the valley. Hashirama has one hand outstretched, and he looks so desperate that Madara actually pauses to hear what he has to say. He has heard his voice many times, of course, calling out techniques or shouting orders to troops over the din of battle, but it has never been directed at him. By this point the brief skirmishes they have engaged in progress so fluidly that there is no need for threats or declarations. Madara has come to believe that in fact, these are the mark of inferior shinobi. Still, the strange tense understanding between them makes it all the sweeter for him to lower his fan and let the first words he says to Hashirama be, "Is that enough, then?"

His enemy smiles ruefully. "Something like that, Uchiha-san. Your flag has fallen."

Madara whips around. Indeed, the Uchiha clan banner is nowhere to be seen, and the Kaguyas' white tree flies triumphant over the fortress. He curses and snaps the fan to the bandolier on his back. For a moment, he is stunned that he has allowed himself to become so preoccupied he didn't notice the defeat, and then the jerfalcon swoops down and alights on the wrapped cloth at his elbow.

Izuna's message says simply _Do not approach. Outnumbered. _

Madara lights the message afire and reaches into the pouch at his waist to give the jerfalcon a piece of biscuit. As he does so he is acutely conscious of Hashirama's eyes on him. Finally his irritation breaks and he snaps, "You've never seen a messenger bird before?"

"No," comes the reply, "I haven't."

Madara stares at him.

Hashirama says, "We still send messages by courier. It seems wrong to involve beasts of the wood in our war."

Madara raises his arm to eye level, clicks his tongue at the bird, and moves his elbow to jostle her lightly. She spreads her wings wide and takes flight.

"But I must concede," says Hashirama, "that falconry is a beautiful art."

Madara ignores this. "Why did you stop the fight? You are allied with the Kaguya for this battle, aren't you?"

"Something like that."

"Why do you keep _saying _that?"

They stare at each other, and then Hashirama spreads his hands palm up, a helpless, deceptive gesture that sends a trickle of sweat coursing down the back of Madara's neck. His tunic suddenly itches.

"The battle is over. There is no purpose served in killing you here," says Hashirama, and upon seeing Madara's look, hastily amends, "or in allowing myself to be killed."

"I was raised to kill you," says Madara, and the moment it's out in the air he knows it's true. Their paths have circled closer and closer together since they were children, since he was ten years old and heard Senju Hashirama's name as he completed his first mission. They are so hopelessly entangled without any action of their own that he would have to raze the forest to the ground before he can understand the sticky feeling that claws at the edges of his clothing, as treacherous as tar-covered brambles in the wilderness. It has been reassuring—like a scale balanced against its opposing member, two weights at the end of a long chain. He raises his fan, and in its opposite mirror Hashirama's hands come together. A single birch tree shoots towards the sky, unraveling branches and leaves like afterthoughts as it goes. Some kind of signal—but nothing like any signal he has ever seen.

Admiration glitters in his blood like poison. Stunned and slightly afraid, he charges, and Hashirama sidesteps, blocks, and grips the edge of his sleeve as they cross, shoulder to shoulder.

"Go and save your clan," says Hashirama in a low voice next to his ear, and as he looks into the valley he sees hundreds of red-armored Senju swarming the Kaguya in the valley, all directing shouts and gestures at the birch tree above their heads.

"We do not require your pity!" exclaims Madara. Hashirama pushes him backward, over the lip of the valley, so that he has no choice but to draw his fan and scrabble to retain his footing.

"It is nothing so complex," says Hashirama's voice behind him as they fall. "I am doing this for the same reason you stopped when I asked it of you."

Madara's head snaps up, because acknowledgment like this, like a slap on a soldier's back, is nothing he has ever known before, among the rationed glances and words of the Uchiha—mold-covered walls, and friends dead for the twist of power inside the eye—nothing so clean as this has existed before. He watches Hashirama bring timbers from the ground, and like a riot breaking inside his chest the adrenaline courses in and removes the rest of his doubts.

"_Go!_" says Hashirama.

Long before the thought of Konoha is born, they make truce. And they go.

* * *

**thirty-two years**

* * *

This is the last time Hashirama speaks with him:

He can barely hear anything Madara is saying over the crystalline sound of everything in the world splintering, delicate chimes and metal on metal as pieces clink together; so many things shattering like a thousand pictures in a thousand frames. Konoha itself comes down in a rain of glass, and through the glitter of destruction there is only Madara's face through the waterfall, drawn and tense and white at the fact of discovery, but still the _same _in ways that only Hashirama will ever be able to see. Some part of him already knows, even as he grips Madara's collar, that this will not end any differently. Still the legendary Shodaime of Konohagakure finds he doesn't give a shit at all and crushes Madara to his chest hard enough to snap his bones. Through the thin wet fabric of the shirt, he can feel the scars from his own sword.

The encounter is chance, and if he had ever expected to find Madara it would not have been like this—under the waterfall, turned grey-blue in the shadow of his own statue—but he thinks of Madara saying _ I was born to kill you _and knows that there is no question of chance here at all. He's been turning a speech to bring him home over and over in his mouth like a cleansing pill, waiting in vain for a moment when he could bite down and regurgitate its arguments and official sanctions; he just never figured that the chance would ever exist, since the last thing he remembers is that powerful, silk-spun chakra under his fingers winking out like a light, and it's as if those fingers, too, have felt nothing at all in the eleven years since.

Senju Hashirama holds his ghost of a friend and shuts his eyes against the fact of Madara's leaving again. He is still thrumming with shock, but he knows already that as soon as his arms weaken Madara will stand up, and shake the water loose from his unbound hair, and walk backwards towards wherever he has gone—_the Water Country_? _Was that what he said_?—and then there will be nothing again, because there always is.

But still, a shinobi like Madara does not _allow_ himself to be found. Because of this Hashirama will go on believing, until the end of his life, that Madara will come back home.

He thinks of the fierce, untamed quality in Madara's face at their long-ago battles, and then he remembers: to perceive equality is to eliminate loneliness. That had been the way they were, in those days, too young to lead and too talented to follow. Trapping their words against the skin of their teeth, waiting for someone, _anyone_, to assure them that their type of genius had been born more than once into this world. Swollen like fruits with well-worn antagonism—so much like love: the electricity of touch, the shock of one face across a crowded clearing—that at some point Hashirama had stopped being able to tell the difference.

He opens his mouth to tell him this—

-but all that comes out, in endless breaking tones, is "You're alive, you're alive, _you're_ _alive_."

* * *

**eighteen years  


* * *

**

This is the first time Madara laughs with him:

Izuna's eyes are perpetually crying. It makes sense. He was always in the habit of wasting tears on everything, and even at the end he went to his death with a smile on his face and tearstains on his cheeks. Still, Madara rages at this more than the unimaginable pain, which seeps under the doorways and the windowsills and the cracks in the timbers and sinks axe-blades into the delicate globes of his eyes, letting the tears fly like chips. The fact of a roof over his head does not help in the least—after almost a year of peacetime he is still unaccustomed to the feeling of beams over his head. Most nights, he rises and walks. Morning often finds him sprawled in the courtyard, or lazing on the roof staring unblinkingly at the sunrise over the village.

"Try to sleep indoors," Hashirama usually says. "This is what it means to have peace."

Madara scoffs at this, because Hashirama doesn't know any more about peace than he does. The difference is that in this, at least, Hashirama is even more of a pretender than any sharingan wielder has ever been—sleeping indoors, relieving night sentries, showing up at the Uchiha compound one day with a goddamn _basket of eggs _in some sort of mentally deficient show of goodwill. They spent an entire morning chasing chickens around a mokuton-engineered coop, proving the horrifying truth that sharingan speed was completely ineffective against waddling birds. Hashirama had spouted something inane about domestication and livestock breeding, and Madara had gone along with this because during that brief interval of time—feathers in their hair, tipped-over crates, injured dignity and more besides—Izuna's eyes had stopped tearing up.

"Your eyes seem better," was what Hashirama had said, and then he had courteously stretched out his hand and smudged the last few involuntary tears away from Madara's cheekbone. There had nearly been severed fingers for this, but at least twelve different Uchiha clansmen were standing around eyeing Madara with glares that said _peace treaty _and _armistice _in no uncertain terms, so Hashirama had kept his index and his peace treaty and the underscore of mild curiosity that pervaded the entire thing, as if he hadn't already seen signature moves and surprise recoveries and battle-weariness and all of Madara that really mattered.

But he is awake in the predawn light and Izuna's eyes are crying again, wells of tears in his traitorous face, and the pain comes from the soft places in his brain and blinds him again so that he can barely see. Madara kneels on the slate rooftop and fists his fingers in the hair at his temples and lets the eyes cry, because he no longer knows why Izuna, wherever he is, is so sad, and the time is past when he can give his brother an apple and the darkness will turn back after that first bite.

_I will lead this village for you_, he says fiercely. The ghost still cries. Madara clutches at his hair and doubles up, and underneath him, a few drops of blood splatter the rooftiles.

Hashirama finds him like that and is on his knees beside in a moment, as if he's never been the one to reduce Madara to this on so many other occasions. And perhaps it's the fact that his eyes are weeping blood, or that it is impossible to forget Izuna when the chafing sandpaper loss lives in his veins, or that Hashirama's hair with the dawn behind it is the golden-brown color of _rest_—of a respite that Madara has heard of and dreamt of but never reached out for—but he reaches out now, and kisses his old enemy so desperately that they both lose their balance and fall backwards onto the timbers. Grey slats in new wooden grain, and the crossbeams have all the power of Hashirama's arms. Madara pushes his hand into the neck of the summer robe and feels worn skin, skin with grooves in it, scars he has left. Hashirama's eyes are closed. For the first time in his life, Madara closes his own in the presence of another person.

Hashirama kisses the way he fights. Everything is assessing and slow at first and then suddenly clicks into place with the rapid-fire brilliance of his reputation, surrounding Madara with the things that he is: tendrils of vine-twining hair, fingers as sturdy as branches, loamy scent of earth that can support, can grow things. Can salvage those things that have been grafted, stolen from others' lands or faces. Madara takes each slice of movement for himself; he is a child of war and knows that a precious memory must be hoarded more carefully than food, than weaponry, than life—

Hashirama pulls him away for a moment. Then he says, slowly and with infinite caring, "Are—are they supposed to be bleeding, Madara-san?"

That first peal of laughter is the newest thing in their friendship, and Madara is too preoccupied with the way it sounds to note that he was the one who began it. It spreads like a handful of leaves dropped into still water, and soon they are both shaking with it. White flags unfurl from towers unseen. He kisses Hashirama again, and, Izuna's eyes, for the first and last time, are completely devoid of pain.

* * *

**twenty-one years  


* * *

**

This is the last time Hashirama laughs with him:

The sword protrudes up and to the right, and as Hashirama slides it free, Madara's body falls without protest to the ground. When he shifts, Madara's head lolls, and Hashirama's hand on the curve of his back is all that keeps him up.

There should be a ceremony or a funeral or at least a farewell, but Madara's death is as if the timbers have been ripped from the very village itself—as if he returned one night to find a heap of rubble where his creation had once stood. He feels as if someone has taken something soft and trembling from him and hidden it away in a place without sunlight.

"Don't linger," says Uzumaki Mito. She is pale and shaking, and there is a bright slash of blood across her cheek, but she is alive. She holds out her hand. He takes it.

"He exerted himself as well," she says. "Look at the amount of bleeding from his eyes."

"No. They're supposed to do that," and he has no idea what he's saying anymore, but he remembers the last time someone said _this_.

Hashirama knocks his forehead against his friend's and smears the blood of his eyes on his dampened cheeks, and then, for the last time, he palms the ridge of Madara's shoulder, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

* * *

**twenty years  


* * *

**

This is the first time Madara falls in love:

There are two bottles of Konoha-brewed liquor, both half empty and brimming with amber-colored sparks through the empty glass of their necks. The bottles clatter together with every movement they make. Hashirama murmurs something like _we should be getting back soon_, and Madara nearly gives him a furious diatribe about how _nobody _says that when they're buried up the hilt in Uchiha Madara, but it isn't like he has any experience to back this up and anyway within the next second Hashirama's hand slides over his hips and does something that sends the entire speech shattering word for word. Hashirama smiles. Madara lets him edge the yukata off his shoulders, and over his white skin he notices that Hashirama's has a dark warmth to it, like the shadow of trees. He drives his hips up to meet Hashirama's thrusts, letting their mouths meld together, and when Hashirama's hand comes up to cup the back of his head he actually gasps, for this is an intimacy stranger than the hardness inside him, stranger even than the fact of Hashirama's fingers knotted tightly in his own. The bottles on the table clatter, and through the awning of the tent, sunlight slashes like a knife. Layers of pleasure form, crest, ebb, are lost in the movement of muscle and bright sweat, and layers of memory fall away in an answering movement as the trees shed their last dead leaves.

Hunger, cold, the bandage over Izuna's eyes—each tapers. Flashes. Disappears.

Madara closes his eyes in full view of his friend's open ones, tips his head back, and clings to Hashirama's hipbones as his history slides free. He knows already, as Izuna's eyes begin to ache again, that he will have left the village before the week is out. He knows the look of the Uchiha as they turn their backs to him, and the village council's raised hands as Hashirama is voted into the leadership. This is, in more than one sense, the _last _memory he will inhabit with the soon-to-be-Shodaime. After this—

Hashirama scores red marks into his shoulders, and Madara sighs sharply as the shaking soaring electricity in his veins peaks, burns, and turns his vision white.

They have converged, he thinks, and now they will divide. With this, at last, their story is complete.

* * *

**twenty years  


* * *

**

This is the last time Hashirama falls in love:

Madara's glance says very plainly that someone will die if Hashirama attempts to pull him closer, but, boneless and dizzy with the aftershock of sunlight, he does so anyway, and considers it a personal triumph that Madara ends up doing absolutely nothing at all, just lies there and stares at him in cold, blistering rage that doesn't mesh well with the last motes of peace flickering away across his features. Hashirama's fingers hunt them like fireflies. Some hide under the bridge of Madara's nose, some spill across his cheekbones, some turn cool as they meet his eyes, grey and indecipherable.

Hashirama places his fingers to his old enemy's chest and learns the grain of his skin. Here he has earned and marked his peace, and here he has acknowledged the lonely wild boy who stood on the mountaintop and watched him create a miracle. He has made many things; victory and village and validation for his clan, but this is something above all of these, a moment of synchronicity that, in all his overtures, he has never thought possible. The battles have been like the movement of their bodies, mounting, and this is the finale—now, there is nothing more for them to do but lie sated in the peace they have made.

They have divided, he thinks, and now they will converge. With this, at last, their story is complete.

* * *

_end_


End file.
